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McCain’s Pinkish Pick Sarah Palin:
Mother Of All Controversies |
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September 3, 2008 Washington: “The Mommy
Wars: Special Campaign Edition” — Not the
headlines that the Republican National
Convention (RNC) expected or wanted to see
this week. While Hurricane Gustav provided
some shelter for Republican presidential
candidate Sen. John McCain’s pick for his vice
president, Alaskan Gov. Sarah Palin released
the news — while the mainstream media was
covering the hurricane — that her
17-year-old-daughter was five months pregnant.
On any other day, the pregnancy story would
have dominated the RNC coverage and consumed
cable news, but television news is where the
anchors are, and they were in Louisiana
covering Gustav. Now, as Americans began
learning about Sarah Palin this week — Alaskan
hunter, hockey mom, former beauty queen,
corruption fighter and previously unknown
governor — they also began piecing together
her family life and all its complications.
The disclosure presented — at the very least —
an unwanted distraction for McCain’s campaign
as he prepares for his nomination. It also
moved the McCain campaign into unfamiliar —
and potentially difficult — waters.
And, although McCain’s advisers told reporters
they are confident that the story would soon
fade, there are worries that other yet unknown
tidbits about Palin may interfere with the
careful effort by the McCain campaign to
portray her as a socially conservative,
corruption-fighting hockey mom with five
children.
Palin was not one of McCain’s first choices.
He initially wanted either Sen. Joe Lieberman,
former Democrat (now Independent) from
Connecticut, or former Gov. Tom Ridge of
Pennsylvania. But both men favor abortion
rights, a huge issue to the Christian
conservatives who make up a crucial base of
the Republican Party. The result was a real
power struggle — for as word leaked that
McCain was considering the men, he was
inundated by furious and influential
conservatives who threatened an explosive
floor fight at the convention and vowed that
neither Ridge nor Lieberman would be elected
by the delegates. With time running out,
McCain turned to Palin, interviewing her one
day before publicly announcing she was his
running mate. The announcement caused battle
lines to be drawn between women across the
United States over whether she has
overextended herself with five children,
including an infant with Down syndrome and a
pregnant daughter.
Palin has set off a fierce argument among
American women about whether there are enough
hours in the day for her to take on the vice
presidency, and whether she is right to try.
“When you combine the special-needs infant
with the pregnant teen, some voters might
wonder why she is pursuing political ambitions
at the expense of maternal or family
responsibilities,” Don Sipple, a Republican
strategist and past adviser to President
George W. Bush in Texas, told reporters.
How the country reacts to the pregnancy of
Palin’s daughter is more of a sociological
question than a political one. McCain’s
political opponent, Sen. Barack Obama, reacted
quickly. “Let me be as clear as possible,”
Obama said. “I think people’s families are
off-limits, and people’s children are
especially off-limits. This shouldn’t be part
of our politics. It has no relevance to Gov.
Palin’s performance as governor or her
potential performance as a vice president.”
Obama said reporters should “back off these
kinds of stories” and noted that he was born
to an 18-year-old mother. But the issue
clearly is a challenge to the traditional
image of a potential first family.
“The media is already trying to spin this as
evidence that Gov. Palin is a hypocrite, James
Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family,
told reporters. “But all it really means is
that she and her family are human.” But the
family’s personal dilemma, which is not likely
to be mentioned by either Sens. Obama or Joe
Biden, may have taken away the Republicans’
long insistence that it owns family values. It
also has pushed economic issues such as
teenage pregnancy, sex education, and the cost
of day care for working women, health
insurance and equal pay, as well as abortion,
more fully into the debate.
There also is little doubt that Sen. Hillary
Clinton will campaign more vigorously for the
Democrats than she might have after losing out
to Sen. Biden to be on the ticket. |
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